American Flagg! Omnibus on the Way

A week or so ago, I saw that Image was putting out a Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! Omnibus. There's now a pre-order listing up on Amazon. It says it will be 1064 pages and contain issues 1-30 plus the American Flagg! Special. That would leave twenty more issues for this first series and then the 12 issues of the 1988 series, Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!

I have the Dynamic forces definitive collection hardcover of the first 14 issues (which is really the best of the series), but it will be great to have the whole thing in an omnibus. It's a seldom discussed, but seminal in many ways, comic of the 1980s.

The omnibus is scheduled to be released October 27.

The Last Abraxan

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video about a recent Kickstarter by Mike Ortiz for a retro Bronze Age Marvel sci-fi superhero comic, something inspired by the works of the likes of David Anthony Kraft, Steve Gerber, and of course, Jim Starlin. Not only is the comic told in the particular idiom of 70s Marvel, colored in halftone dots, and features fake ads homaging common ones of the day, but the physical copy is also printed on newsprint. 

Well, I had to get a copy, and I can safely say, this was truly a labor of love by Ortiz. The detail that went into the product is impressive. You can get a hint of all of that in the "making of" features on the website. In the physical copy order, there were also extras like stickers and hardcopies of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe style file entries.

The story is definitely in the Bronze Age style, though leans a bit tongue-in-cheek. The art and design complete capture the inspirations.

The Elusive Volume

In try to run down various hardcover comics-related series, it always seems like there's one volume that's unusually rare and doesn't show up very often--and when it does people want more for it. You can get the others fairly easy, but that one elusive volume makes it hard to complete the set without really paying for it.

Lately, it seems like that volume is number 2. 

Over the holidays, I was trying to complete the sets of Star Hawks, the newspaper strip by Goulart and Kane, collected in three volumes by IDW in 2017. I got volumes 1 and 3 fairly easily, but 2 doesn't seem to show up in a price range I'm willing to pay for it. It doesn't show up as often and some places goes for 4-5 times as much!

Then there's the Star Wars newspaper strip collections also from IDW. Here, there's supposedly a Marvel Omnibus coming, but I assume it will be based on the Dark Horse reprints that were arranged in portrait, comic book format and colored, and I don't think they are planning on reprinting the earliest, Russ Manning strips. Here again, the second volume with the great Al Williamson material is the tricky one to find. Not quite as bad as Star Hawks, but the available ones tend be in pretty heavily used condition. I finally relented and got one, though.

So what's the deal? Do these middle volumes just happen to get lower print runs? 

Flash Gordon turns 92

The Flash Gordon comic strip by Alex Raymond and Don Moore debuted on this day in 1934. The current creator on the strip Dan Schkade is doing an homage to that first story, "On the Planet Mongo" this week. 

Flash started out as a Sword & Planet character, perhaps the most famous of those that followed in John Carter's footsteps, before going in a more Buck Rogers direction (though Rogers started out less spacefaring than he became) in the 50s and later decades. Much of the Flash Gordon media post the 1980 has moved the character in a Star Wars direction, at least visually, which is ironic given the influence Flash Gordon film serials had on the Star Wars films.

I enjoy Schkade's and other modern takes than all a blend of elements from multiple eras, but keep as the core Raymond's adventure story on another world.

I hope Flash Gordon continues his adventures for decades to come.

The Year in Review

Over the holiday, I was looking back over the past year here at the Flashback Universe Blog, I'm pleased to see the top posts were old ones by Jim, the founder of the blog. His various posts of Public Domain characters seem just as relevant as ever to the reading public. "Is Dracula in the Public Doman?" from 2015 got the most views this year. That was followed by "The Top 10 Public Doman Heroes?" from 2010.

Various posts in Jim and my reviews of Wild Wild West still get a fair amount of traffic. "Revisiting the Wild Wild West: The Night of the Juggernaut" from 2021 came in in the top 20.

My top post after taking over the blog is from this year. It's my review of The Avengers in the Veracity Trap by Kidd and Cho from August of this year. My second biggest was also a review. It was in my occasional Paperback Flashback series and took a look at the restored edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Beyond the Farthest Star.

Thanks to those of you out there still reading, and Happy New Year.

My Favorite Comics of 2025

 Most of my comics reading in 2025 was of DC in the early 80s for my ongoing series on my other blog. I did manage to continue to follow I number of series I have enjoyed beyond this year: Batman/Superman: World's Finest (DC), Batman & Robin: Year One (DC), G.I. Joe (Energon Universe, Skybound), W0rldtr33 (Image), and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (VIZ). I also checked out a number of other series, limited series, and graphic novels.

Listed here are my favorites. Some will be whole limited series; some will be individual issues. They are in no particular order other than when they occurred to me.

Batman/Superman: World's Finest (2022-) #44: This is another Robin/Supergirl team-up, a rare but recurring feature in the title, but always welcome. The interaction of the two junior heroes is always humorous in Waid's rendition of the characters.

Absolute Martian Manhunter #1: While this whole series has been good so far, the first issue was such a pleasant surprise it deserves special mention.

Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 3: The Secret of the Saucer: This might be my least favorite installment of this series, but it's such a good series that it makes this list. This one is told in reverse essentially, so that the main characters memory mental dislocation caused by exposure to an alien "spacecraft" can be to a degree experienced by the reader. It makes catching the flow of events and picking up the plot threads related to the deeper mysteries of Hobtown that much harder, though, so I'm not sure it was the best choice. Still a great read.

Drome: I've talked about this graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan before, so I won't repeat that all here, but it's great.

Bug Wars: I really enjoy "small hero" stories and genre works with good worldbuilding. This has both!

The Whole Bloody Affair

Last week, I took in Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair at the theater. This is combined version of Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (from 2003 and 2004, respectively). This version, which supposedly fits better with Tarantino's original conception of the film screened at Cannes in 2006, but this is the first time it got a wide release.

This version removes some material made extraneous by it being one film and adds an additional anime sequence, further detailing the background of O-Ren Ishi. Beyond that, it feels like there are some scenes that are cut differently in minor ways and perhaps some use some slightly different takes, though since I haven't seen the original films in a decade probably, I may misremember.

If you really liked Kill Bill, you should see this one, particularly if you haven't seen it in some time. The runtime is long, but there is an intermission, and honestly sitting through this one felt less of a chore than sitting through several of the merely over 2 hours Marvel installments or the theatrical cuts of the Lord of the Rings films. The scenes tend to be short enough not to overstay their welcome and what is going on is interesting. Actually, I feel like the pacing is better here even compared to other Tarantino works like Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight.

Seeing this move on the big screen again in 2025 made me nostalgic for another era in cinema that wasn't really all that long ago. Before the financial pressures of streaming left the studios chasing increasingly formulaic and assembled by committee franchise blockbusters.